Tempestuous Fury

I write this post as a break from the busy to do list I’ve had going for a while now. This morning, I helped Dad with getting my car squared away: oil and filter change, checking the maintenance book for other work to do, swapping out both rear shocks. It was quite productive.

I’ve also fully transitioned from Fedora Core 3 to CentOS 4.3. Why not Fedora Core again? Well, FC 5 plain barfed on install, so I just recently tried FC 4 instead, and boy was that worse! You’d think it’d be better, that the kinks were already gone before they went to 5, but you’d be wrong. The attempt at update went through well enough, but the big problem came after I got it all back up. The resolution wasn’t right! And worse, I couldn’t get it to change right! So part of my screen at the top and bottom weren’t in use, and the whole screen wasn’t displayed, so I got the top or bottom cut off! So I then tried to install the Nvidia drivers, thinking this might solve this and get me 3-D support at the same time. I discovered that the Fedora folks had started hosting their own driver through the yum repositories, and that looked really promising.

No joy on the driver working. In fact, it made things worse: the kernel I installed it to would now lock up when trying to start the X login screen. Yikes. So I had to finnagle an uninstall for it.

Finally, I just said the hell with it, copied all data over to the spare hard drive, and went for the full blown reinstall. That fixes everything, don’t you know, even Windows. And so I received the biggest shock when the install died on an error message after I’d specified everything for the hard drive. It wouldn’t format the drive to reinstall. It was hard to decide if I was more shocked or disgusted. And this was AFTER I’d run the proper media tests on the CDs.

And so I got back into the aborted install of FC 4 and went on the ‘Net with funky screen resolution to look up CentOS, another flavor of Linux I’d read about in the Slashdot FC 5 comments. And now, it’s installed. It’s based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux source, and the latest version will be maintained fully till Feb. of 2008, with errata updates till 2012. So it’ll be a good long time till I go fiddling again.

I’ve got a good feeling about the OS. It reminds me alot of Red Hat 9, except now with yum instead of up2date to wrassle with. With the dependency issue mostly addressed for my purposes, I expect alot of electronic bliss from my desktop computer in the next few years.

And now onto the 3-D driver support, the most daunting challenge.

Be gone Monday and maybe Tuesday seeing JC and E up in Gainesville.